Jon Udell's latest column mentions Friendster's rewrite. He makes exactly the right point: the programming language itself was not really the issue. It's the combination of decisions -- the “it all adds up” factor -- that makes the difference between a platform which fits the task and one which does not.

She says that she was careful to only post about things that were already public knowledge (and it's not as if seeing every Friendster url change from ending in .jsp to .php didn't already tell you everything you needed to know). I wonder if her now-ex-CEO got freaked out seeing the huge amount of attention her posts sometimes got, which was probably more attention than any official Friendster press release has received up to this point. Maybe he didn't stop to think about why that might be.

From her semipermeable blogging paper which I just read:
"Paradoxically, we may be reaching a point where greater expression can only be achieved through greater privacy."

Surprisingly, I just realized that on Monday. I used to make these little writeups of informal lisp meetings, because I felt it was important to increase the amount of lisp litercher. However, there was always someone who asked to make sure I didn't put something they said into a writeup.

Now that I record the talks, it's gotten worse. It makes sense now; these meetings are for people to express what they really can't in daily life. (Because of the wall of uncomprehending resistance.) So my policy is to only release any audio recording if the speaker specifically asks me to; I won't personally ask. Of course, I can also censor the talk since I can edit it, but I don't think speakers want to sit through an hour of hearing themselves talk.

I would also like to get away from using some bulbuous phallic mic and instead use something less obstrusive. But there is a limit to the resources I want to pour into this.